How To Talk About Racism
IN HIS BESTSELLING new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio), New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and the Times’ 1619 Project sharpen racial divides while drawing attention away from actual obstacles to improving quality of life for black Americans.
McWhorter first explored his idea of anti-racism as “Our Flawed New Religion” in a 2015 piece for The Daily Beast and continued the theme in a series of articles for Reason in 2020. “I think something is really distracting people in my world lately into supposing that they’re supposed to fall for a kind of purposeless extremism in order to be good people,” McWhorter says.
Contrary to critics’ vituperative claims, Woke Racism is in no way a right-wing book; McWhorter notes that he’s never voted Republican in his life. “I consider my company to be left-leaning people who read The New York Times and The Atlantic,” he says. “If it were 1960, everybody would think of me as a normal liberal. I would be this Adlai Stevenson–voting, pointy-headed liberal person.” Since the late ’60s, though, the idea has taken hold that “on race, radicalism is default.” Though this attitude has ebbed and flowed over time, McWhorter argues that today’s anti-racist crusaders evince a quasi-religious fanaticism that ends up hurting, not helping, the plights of black Americans.
In November, McWhorter spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about what white people get out of cooperating with this ideological agenda, what black people gain by “performing” victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.
Reason: What’s the elevator pitch for Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America?
McWhorter: There is a group of people who are committed to what they call social justice, certain enough of their moral purity that they are willing to hurt other people if they not as some boring statement from the right wing about family values and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This is a book saying there are black people who need help. The people who are calling themselves black people’s saviors don’t understand this. What they’re caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help.
